Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Talebis a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II...
NationalityLebanese
ProfessionScientist
CountryLebanon
mother humility years
I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism
mother never-trust journalist
Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.
mother odds law
If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
serendipity luck
...maximize the serendipity around you.
weakness
It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.
delay large members united
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
happiness humanity replace trade
Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.
Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.
children
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
risks
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.
accounts catholic crusades deeply french greek sceptical school side
If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.
surplus
Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.